Sunday, 28 June 2015

How to make wrapping paper bunting.

I'm not sure this can really be called a tutorial, but I thought I'd share how I made this for Small Boy's birthday recently.

I didn't come up with the idea myself - I borrowed the construction method from someone else (I saw it at a friend's house) - but I did come up with the idea of using wrapping paper myself. Aren't I a clever girl?

You could absolutely choose any type of paper for this. The inspiration bunting was made from brown parcel paper, and some pink paper that looked to be of equal weight, which were strung onto ribbon. It was far classier, and prettier than my version. But I wanted to make this for a 5 year old, to brighten up the Scout hall where we had his party, so bright, colourful and cheap were the order of the day. You could use wallpaper, coloured paper, newspapers or magazines or even an old telephone directory. Or you could go all Jackson Pollock (or let the kids do it) with some paint and a big roll of white paper.

You will need:

Paper

String, twine, or ribbon

Scissors

Cardboard to use as template (cereal packet will do)

Pen/pencil

First make your template. Decide how big you want your "flags", or triangles to be, and then draw onto cardboard. Then, along the top of the flag/triangle, draw another triangle, upside down, which should be the same size. So you end up with a diamond shape. My flags were 10cm across, by 13cm in length, so my diamond measured 26cm in length. The width obviously remained 10cm.

This looks assymetric, but that's just the angle I took the photo at.

Use the template to draw round and then cut out lots of diamonds from the paper. I used the wrapping paper that comes folded, with 2 sheets (and gift cards) in a pack. I got 36 flags from one pack. I also cut it folded once, so I was cutting 2 at a time, much like cutting fabric!

Fold the diamonds in half, creating triangles.

Fold the diamonds/triangles over the string, and then staple in place, spacing the flags as you prefer. I used one staple, but for larger flags, you might want to do two. You can staple the flags to the string, but I stapled to one side of the string, so I could slide the flags up and down as required.

Leave long ends on the string, to tie the bunting up, and then cut string to length.